I could be dead wrong, but I seriously doubt that Google or any publicly traded company will shut down for a day. I just can't see them taking that big of a step in protest of the SOPA.
They'd probably to announce it first, if it was a complete blackout; but if they didn't, someone going to the site would probably see just a blank page with information on the SOPA etc. Call me cynincal, but I'll bet 9 times out of 10 that the consequence would be the person either just clicking the Tweet/Like/+1 button (unless those sites have also blacked-out) and/or going to another site that provides the same service ("Google is down, so I'll use Bing" "Facebook is down, I'll use Twitter/Google+") That's not all though; other apps, companies, etc. that rely on Google or whoever would also have to shutdown temporarily (except if the parent site kept the APIs open, but then what's the point?) Is that fair to those companies, to those coders? You might say it's a short term loss, long term gain, but other people might not see it that way; e.g. "This site is down, so I'll use this other service until they are back up." I'm not talking about why they shouldn't but why they wouldn't if they don't.
More importantly though, how will this change anything? I'm not saying people or companies shouldn't protest, but I think the only thing the company that blacks-out their site will get will be a lot of angry customers and investors. More people will be aware of the SOPA, and maybe mainstream media will at least mention it, but talk doesn't change unless action follows. Perhaps I'm over-thinking this, but to me it just doesn't seem to be the most effective way of protesting.
I guess that I assumed that they were talking about putting up a permanent black bar at the top of their pages with information about SOPA and their reasons for opposing it. I hadn't seriously considered that anyone would take down their entire site. If organizers are hoping that a large site will completely go offline, I think they are nuts.
This is one of the problems with a very decentralized anti-SOPA movement - there is no organization. I think that's why people are just hoping for a Google to take the lead.
Google, at least, could just do one of their doodles. That wouldn't be quite like shutting down for a day, but it's something they've done before and those doodles have gotten a lot of attention in the past.
I wonder what creative ways they could find to inform the public about SOPA in the next week or so? What's the best anti-SOPA argument any of you have seen?
Game theory would suggest that, since SOPA opposition is in part a coordination problem, one person arbitrarily picking a day may be all it takes to get multiple groups with similar interests to organize.
Why not just replace the website with a full page banner that the user can close after reading? It will inform the user without pissing them off that they cannot use the website.
I can see some senator(s) coming along and crying about how companies have too much power because these companies promote "intellectual property theft," then a year later complaining that government needs to get out of business because the companies are going bankrupt.
The Internet giants could come out and cry about how congress is killing the people's future as well the children's future.
Extended: They are willing to take a day's loss and a loss of a politically neutral reputation for this brief event because such anti-Internet bills will harm the people and children. They believe it's wrong that the biggest support for the bills are from groups with a conflict of interest for death of sharing instead of adapting to newer technology that empowers people.
(This is just my opinion.) I would argue that a company that comes out against the SOPA does it more out of interest in having control over its content, what it does and not having a monopolistic third-party shut them down. They do it for survival of themselves first.
I'm sure that most of them care about internet freedom (after all, companies are composed of people who have their own freedom of expression); and if it didn't affect them whatsoever, I'm sure that many companies would take a stand against the SOPA and we'd be in the same position as we are now.
Of course, companies that have supported the bill have done so out of interest in having control of their 'material.' So we have two different points of view, one for and one against. However, both come from a need for control of content (some would call it greed, but that has negative connotations which I don't feel like addressing.)
My comment that you replied to has nothing to do with companies supporting or not supporting the SOPA, for freedom or not, but rather that some politicians (see the ones who support the SOPA) see things from an individual standpoint: i.e., they support business freedom except when it interferes with either their supporters (MPAA, RIAA, etc.) or what they 'believe' in. In other words, they want their cake and they want to eat it too.
Both of those links have people using 'blackout' in unclear and mixed ways. Several of the hits for the 'blackout' search discuss click-through interstitials and temporary page-blackening (a technique that has been used before in mutli-site protests without completely withholding services, for more than a few seconds' delay).
The Declan McCullaugh 'nuclear option' prediction in CNET [1] only mentions the home pages simultaneously "turn[ing] black with anti-censorship warnings that ask users to contact politicians".
The Wikipedia (en) thread where a lot of this escalation-of-attention can be traced to included a mixture of both disablement-blackout (as I believe the Italian Wikipedia did for its domestic protest) and interstitial 'blackout' discussion.
The term is very broad without added context clarifying each use.
I'm wondering whatever happened to Wikipedia's blackout. Since they're the first ones to actually put forth a serious blackout suggestion (as opposed to this one guy's just announcing a day), shouldn't people be coordinating with them?
I am impressed with any decision being made on this. I think it's justified no matter how they do it. And if they do something outrageous it would only match what they are choosing to take a stand against. It's a NEED! And for a day...who cares. It's statement that should be made.
Anyone worried about the outcome of one day with Google being down aren't really thinking about what is at stake in the long run.
They'd probably to announce it first, if it was a complete blackout; but if they didn't, someone going to the site would probably see just a blank page with information on the SOPA etc. Call me cynincal, but I'll bet 9 times out of 10 that the consequence would be the person either just clicking the Tweet/Like/+1 button (unless those sites have also blacked-out) and/or going to another site that provides the same service ("Google is down, so I'll use Bing" "Facebook is down, I'll use Twitter/Google+") That's not all though; other apps, companies, etc. that rely on Google or whoever would also have to shutdown temporarily (except if the parent site kept the APIs open, but then what's the point?) Is that fair to those companies, to those coders? You might say it's a short term loss, long term gain, but other people might not see it that way; e.g. "This site is down, so I'll use this other service until they are back up." I'm not talking about why they shouldn't but why they wouldn't if they don't.
More importantly though, how will this change anything? I'm not saying people or companies shouldn't protest, but I think the only thing the company that blacks-out their site will get will be a lot of angry customers and investors. More people will be aware of the SOPA, and maybe mainstream media will at least mention it, but talk doesn't change unless action follows. Perhaps I'm over-thinking this, but to me it just doesn't seem to be the most effective way of protesting.